Monday, January 30, 2012

I have a confession to make. I am guilty of the sin of censorship. I know, I know. It's hard to believe that I, purveyor of vagina in a can posts, would be holding anything back. But it's true.

What I have been hiding from you are the romantic propositions of one Rodney Van P. (kinda his real name.) I thought it was to protect your delicate sensibilities, but I now realize I was wrong and perhaps have been preventing you from experiencing your own Beautiful Love Story.

If you don't know Rodney Van P. (and how could you, due to my cruelty?), he is a frequent poster to the In Bed With Married Women Facebook page. No matter what the topic, he has his own spin to it, generally him offering to "eat kitties."

"Ive never had any bad sex with married women and love to orally please their bodies eat their pussies and screw them and eat them out again after sex, So add me you horny married women please."

I thought you would not want to hear this, so I deleted it at once. But was I wrong? Were these the sweet sweet words you've been longing to hear?

I'm so so sorry. Just because he is not appealing to me (his Facebook list of favorite books includes: "Double Penetriciton," "Fuck Books!!!" and "Fuck My Ass." And everyone knows that "Double Penetriciton 2: Even More Penetriciton" is the far superior book) doesn't mean you wouldn't like him just fine. I do not want to stand in the way of True Love.

So here is another Rodneyism I withheld from you. I forgot what he was commenting on, but it will not surprise you to hear Rodney's take on the subject:

"Id love to taste your fat and meaty kitty."

Good old Rodney! No matter what I posted on the FB page, he always liked it and was always there with a (slightly differently worded) offer to eat kitty. That's the thing about Rodney. He was so tenacious. Even though his propositions were never up on the page for--at most--5 minutes before I'd discover them and delete them in horror, the guy Kept On Trying.

"Maybe the problem is my wording," he must have mused, pondering the shocking lack of response to his generous and appealing offer of kitty eating. "Perhaps I shall change 'eat your pussy before and after sex' to 'taste your fat and meaty kitty.' Blast it all! Why are women so inscrutable?"

I guess it was this tenacity in the face of his endless lack of success* that kept me from deleting Rodney instantly as I have so many of his barely literate brethren on the Facebook page.

So today it pains me somewhat to finally give in and delete the hapless Rodney forever, taking the FB fan from the suggestive number of 469 to the more blah 468. And, I have to confess, I'm kind of gonna miss the guy.

Best post ever. And ultimately the most depressing to read and realize... my best years, where only a few precious moments were like Nicole's description (only from a dude's POV) were before age 21. 20+ yrs later, it's galling and terminally depressing to know, I will never again experience such a thing. Rather than wonder WTH I did wrong to marry a woman who has utterly no concept of any of this stuff... I'll just go back to work and be another walking dead 40-something dude. *puts bag on head and shambles off*

Ugh, so completely sad and horrible! And so... just... true. There's a certain particular hideousness to sexual loneliness within a marriage that is its own private torture. I mean, it's not really the kind of thing that people talk to each other about, despite it being, I think, quite common.

Witness this Twitter response--I won't identify the writer so as to not get him in trouble with the wife--to My Wife's Body by Anonymous Husband: "Sad post for me because I adore my wife but we have never had sexual chemistry and I feel that way about her being but not her body."

So.

The problem here is a partner who is nice enough, a loving parent and all that, but they just don't...well...get sex. Or there is no chemistry. Mainly, and most depressingly, there is a completely upsetting lack of the kind of soul-shaking, hot mind/body fuckery that makes life worth living and whatnot.

Hmmm..... Well, when I am right in the middle of a good bitch session, my friend Leah is fond of saying pointedly, "Okay, we have identified the problem. Now let's work on solutions!" This sort of makes me want to punch her, because I do so enjoy complaining, but the girl has a point. So solutions. Anyone?

I mean, what's Jack to do? I somehow think that putting a bag on his head and shambling off--while being convenient as well as inexpensive--probably isn't the best solution here.

But can you teach someone passion? Can you create chemistry where none lives? Is it wrong to yearn for the kind of transcendent, universe pulsing sex that makes your whole body shake?

I have no clear solutions today--sorry Miss Leah--but I will offer you two routes that readers have taken. I neither endorse nor condemn either. Anyone who's making an honest, clear-headed effort to find workable solutions is okay in my book.

Anyway, you there! You clearly have it all together, do you not? What say you to Jack and everyone else in this situation?

Place bag on head and forge ahead? Light sexual fire under reluctant spouse's ass? (Caution: use metaphorical fire only.) Say "fuck it" to social mores and possibly a fine-enough marriage by banging someone hot on the side? Go it alone with a willing hand and good memories? Channel unfulfilled lust into excessive interest in scrapbooking?

I thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

xoxox
jill

*In the essay, Daedone--the gorgeous teacher/practitioner of Orgasmic Meditation (a practice which sounds about a thousand times more fun than focusing on your breath)--describes a really really good fuck. There were hugely swollen body parts, soaking wetness, something about a honey blanket orgasm. Whatever. The #$%$ was good.

** What the hell happened? According to Liza, "I don't know exactly when the buildup began, but sometime early last year I started to have...feelings. And then I felt like reading sexy stuff. And then I wanted to touch myself again."Liza also makes passing mention of a "medical procedure" that helped with things. More info on that if she answers the rudely nosy email I sent her.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Hi there, sweet thing. Would you like to hear a fairy tale today? Okay, I'll tell you one, but beware, like all fairy tales, there is something relatively horrific in it.

It's not as bad as dear little Hansel and Gretel violently shoving a witch into a hot oven or the Three Little Pigs boiling the Big Bad Wolf alive. ("And as the wolf felt his flesh sear, he howled in the throes of the very deepest agony, while the pigs did a happy little dance and shouted 'Hooray!' Good night kids, sweet dreams....").

But it does involve--and please know that I can barely stand to type this--surgery to move the clitoris. Surgery to move the clitoris two times, after a first unsuccessful surgery. Primitive early 1900s surgery, which I suspect probably involved an ice pick, a rusty hook and unlicensed mesmerism.

Anyway, let us begin with our tale, shall we?

There was once a beautiful (enough) princess named Marie Bonaparte. Even though she was a great-niece of Napoleon and a princess and all, she wasn't happy because well, my friends, poor Marie couldn't have an orgasm.

Part of this probably had to do with the unfortunate (for her, at least) fact that her husband, Prince George of Greece, was a latent homosexual. According to Mary Roach in her completely delightful book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, the bad marital sex kicked off on their wedding night. In Marie's diary, she wrote that George mounted her "in a short brutal gesture, as if forcing [himself]...and apologized "I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children."

But Marie was a plucky sort and was determined to come. She decided she would solve her problem by taking other lovers. Several of them. But they too left her cold. Finally, she tried the most decidedly non-Princess-like move of putting her delicate fingers between her own legs, and found that lo! she could come!

Our plucky princess was also scientifically-minded and, though most of her blood by now busy throbbing desperately through her unfulfilled loins, she still had enough brain power to come up with a hypothesis. Perhaps, she thought, her problem was that her clitoris was too far from her vagina.

A royal experiment was in order. The princess found 243 willing subjects, asked them about their sex lives and somehow convinced them to let her measure the distance between their clitoris and vagina, or C-V distance. In 1924 she published her findings under the pseudonym A.E. Narjani because then, as it probably still is, Princesses don't go around sticking rulers between other women's legs and talking about it. According to this "Narjani":

--21% of women had a C-V distance of more than an inch (that translates to 2.5 centimeters for those of you in progressive countries that have somehow managed to grasp the intricacies of the metric system.). These women couldn't have an orgasm via vaginal intercourse, or did only rarely. The Princess termed them teleclitoridiennes. As Roach writes: "Teleclitoridienne means simply 'female of the distant clitoris,' but it had a lovely, aristocratic ring to it--calling to mind a career women in heels and a sweater set, cabling reports from her home in Biarritz. At the very least, it had a nicer ring to it than 'frigid.'"

--69% were paraclitoridiennes, with a C-V distance of less than an inch. These lucky-ass women were much more likely to have orgasms with vaginal intercourse.

The Princess's research gibes with modern data that finds that there is indeed a correlation between C-V distance and ease of orgasm during the deed. BUT, despite what porn films show and show and show, no way are 69% of modern women coming via regular ol' P in V sex. According to ABC News (and I must say it is pleasing to me to see ABC News using the phrase "sex toys, hands or tongue"):

About 75 percent of all women never reach orgasm from intercourse alone -- that is without the extra help of sex toys, hands or tongue. And 10 to 15 percent never climax under any circumstances.

But back to our story. Marie, perhaps her thinking clouded by unresolved lust, decided that the best cure for her condition was to have her clitoris surgically moved.

And when this didn't work, she tried surgery a-fucking-gain! Which also didn't work.

BUT this tale has a happy ending (and can for you as well, if you're a sweater set-wearing teleclitoridiennes.) Marie finally figured out some twisty Kama Sutra-ish positions, unfortunately lost to the ages, that did indeed get her off.

And our little Princess came and came and lived happily ever after.

P.S. There is a trick to discovering your C-V distance. An inch just happens to be the distance between the tip of your thumb and your first knuckle. So, if you measure using this "rule of thumb"... Oh...you left already?

xoxo
jill

(photo: Albert Arthur Allen, 1929, source) Note: This is actually not a photo of Marie Bonaparte, but c'mon, the chick looks unsatisfied and she's wearing a friggin' crown. I HAD to use it.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

That, my friends, is the full structure of the female clitoris*--including the extensive internal parts. Yes, the clitoris has internal parts! Extensive ones! Am I the only one who didn't know this? I thought a clit was a tiny button there on the outside--the end. For 46-friggin'-years (many of them, to be fair, non-friggin' years), I've been walking around ignorant of my own damn anatomy.

I could choose to wallow in shame over this, but I'm not gonna be too hard on myself because a) I generally cut myself way too much a lot of slack and b) practically no one knows this stuff.

We should have been learning about our extensive clititude way back in 1844 when Georg Ludwig Kobelt published his seminal (though that is undoubtedly the wrong word) clit research in Die männlichen und weiblichen Wollust-Organe des Menschen und einiger Säugetiere (The Male and Female Organs of Sexual Arousal in Man and some other Mammals).

Kobelt discovered a bunch of highly useful info--that, ahem, science, would have been NICE TO KNOW--like: clitorises (the whole extensive lot) become erect when aroused, and have all sorts of parts that you (and by "you," I mean "me") never even heard of like crura, bulbs and other clitorally-related new words I will probably not be incorporating into my sexy talk. "Oh my God! My clitoral vestibule is sooo hot for you."

Although maybe I should be talking vestibules and such. If you're a guy and plan to be sliding your manhood into her sweet feminine folds, you actually do want her clitoral vestibule, as well as her two corpora cavernosa, to be hot for you. When these parts are erect, they'll tighten quite nicely around you.

Most of the clitoris is subterranean. The glans is connected to the body or shaft of the internal clitoris, which is made up of two corpora cavernosa. When erect, the corpora cavernosa encompass the vagina on either side, as if they were wrapping around it giving it a big hug! Near each of the crura on either side of the vaginal opening are the clitoral vestibules. These are internally under the labia majora. When they become engorged with blood they actually cuff the vaginal opening causing the vulva to expand outward. Get these puppies excited, and you’ve got a hungrier, tighter-feeling vaginal opening in which to explore!

If you're feeling sciencey, I highly recommend you have a look at Helen E. O'Connell's Anatomy of the Clitoris in the Journal of Urology. (Important caveat: article contains photos with such labels as "Fig. 2. Lateral view of dissected clitoris in fresh cadaver of 57 year-old post menopausal woman." Which, as a sentence, contains a surprisingly high amount of unpleasant imagery.)

"The tale of the clitoris is a parable of culture, of how the body is forged into a shape valuable to civilization despite and not because of itself," writes O'Connell.

In the oddly enjoyable article (Journal of Urology, who knew you were such a good read?), O'Donnell rails against the medical establishment for not providing decent diagrams and accurate info on clits--a "blinkered approach," she writes. (A blinkered approach that still exists.) She also describes the history of clitorical research with its ever-changing ideas about what goes on between a woman's legs, and the comical regularly that men throughout history have claimed to "discover" the clit, each one giving it names, culumella (little pillar), sedes libidinis (seat of lust) and landica (shhh, Latin profanity!)

In the 1500's, Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius disagreed with Falloppia (yes, he of the tubes) that "healthy women" had a clitoris and wrote: "It is unreasonable to blame others for incompetence on the basics of some sport of nature you have observed in some women and you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part, as if it were an organ, to healthy women." (On a related note: I can find no mention of a Mrs. Vesalius.)

So why isn't anyone bothering to tell us this stuff? It sure would explain a whole fuck of a lot and clear up the vaginal vs. clitoral orgasm debates, what a G-spot is, etc... I mean, it seems like it's all just stimulation of various parts of the clitoris. Right? That said, I do think that orgasms feel different depending on what spot is being stimulated. An orgasm from the G-spot area, or cruca or whatever the fuck we're calling it today, really does seem deeper and richer to me than the more tinny, shallow feel of a clit only orgasm.

And...I can't believe I just wrote that sentence. I am writing to complete strangers (and worse, people I know) and describing the color and tenor of my orgasms. That, my friends, means it is so time for me to go today.

However, if you want to weigh in on matters orgasmic, bring it on. You know I like it when you talk like that to me.

xoxo
jill

* Is it CLIToris or CliTORis? According to Wikipedia, which offers audio pronunciations so you can hear the words, each is correct. So use them both as you please! Wikipedia also offers a pronunciation guide for the UK version, /ˈklaɪtɒrɨs/, which is completely non-helpful gibberish to me, and sadly, does not come with a corresponding audio version. Because my inner 5th grader would really really like to hear a crisp British voice intoning patiently, /ˈklaɪtɒrɨs/.

For more IBWMW info on orgasms (or, in light of new developments, possible misinformation):

About Me

I write In Bed With Married Women, a blog about sex in all its boring, strange, funny, smokin' hot glory. My work has also appeared in Salon, AlterNet, Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Jezebel, Mad, Games and the Los Angeles Times. I look grumpy in all pictures whether grumpy or just kinda neutral.